Dear reader
This blog entry comes with a READERS WARNING that it might turn your stomach ever so slightly. It discusses items of a health nature. If you wish, turn back now.
So it seems I'm fast becoming a liability. Two years ago it was a broken hand that put paid to 8 weeks of beekeeping. This season....another hospitalisation...
Don't worry, I haven't become hyper-sensitive, that of every beekeepers' nightmare. No. The problem was much, much smaller.
After a day bottling and extracting honey two weeks last Thursday, mid afternoon I was just doing some accounts and invoices, when a sharp stabbing pain in my left hand side almost threw me off my chair. In fact it wasn't long before I was on the floor, doubled up in agony on a pain scale of 10/10.
The dreaded kidney stones had reappeared after an absence of some 16 years.
I called 999 after being violently sick and becoming feverish almost immediately. Yes, we'll call you back. They did. Yes, it sounds like you need to be hospitalised. Sadly we have no ambulances available.
Queue a frantic call to my folks who live an hour away. They downed tools and rushed over to find me still on the floor. 40 minutes in the car later i was in the A&E queue in Bath. After about 30 minutes I was triaged. By this time the paid had dropped to about a 7 and I could actually speak. Later that evening, dosed up on morphine, a volterol suppositary and a paracetamol drip I was put on the rotary ward for observation over night.
The next day a round of CT scans and x-ray confirmed a 0.5cm stone was trying to move through a 0.4cm Ureter pipe. They dosed me up and sent me home saying to come back if I had a recurrence.
2am Saturday morning - even worse 10.5/10 fever, sweats, vomiting, ambulance to A&E and two nights in where they discovered my kidney function was failing so they put me into emergency surgery to insert a 12" stent between the LH kidney and bladder.
A week later I was back having the stent and two stones removed and then they re-inserted another stent to allow the pipes to settle down and repair from all the tooings and froings by the cytoscope and stone grabber.
I'm back next week to have the stent removed a second time...this time by pulling on a cord that is currently hanging down out of the old fella. Apparently I have to breath in and out very hard as they 'pull'. You can't imagine how much the thought of that turns my stomach. If you hear a scream at 10am on the 5th. It's me.
The upshot of all this is most likely dehydration. I know I often overheat when opening hives. We've all done it on hot days. But this also allows those who are susceptible to stones to accumulate calcium in the kidney over time.
I'm now downing biblical volumes of water through the day to keep flushing the system. Tea is fine, not so much coffee or beer. In fact with the main killers I've been on beer or any alcohol isn't really on the cards and I haven't wanted a drink.
So the past two weeks has been spent largely horizontal or gingerly walking around. The stent rubs and I've managed about a day a week beekeeping, before the pain kicks in and I simply have to give up exhausted.
Last weekend over 120 supers were hastily put onto hives, just in case, but the weather this week hasn't been that good. Hopefully the rain will keep the clover and bramble yielding next when it warms up towards the 10th July.
It shows how much one gets waylaid by injury and illnesses. And how one is quite helpless to do much while the body recovers.
Hey ho. I hope by Wednesday all this is behind me !
KR
Somerford
This blog entry comes with a READERS WARNING that it might turn your stomach ever so slightly. It discusses items of a health nature. If you wish, turn back now.
So it seems I'm fast becoming a liability. Two years ago it was a broken hand that put paid to 8 weeks of beekeeping. This season....another hospitalisation...
Don't worry, I haven't become hyper-sensitive, that of every beekeepers' nightmare. No. The problem was much, much smaller.
After a day bottling and extracting honey two weeks last Thursday, mid afternoon I was just doing some accounts and invoices, when a sharp stabbing pain in my left hand side almost threw me off my chair. In fact it wasn't long before I was on the floor, doubled up in agony on a pain scale of 10/10.
The dreaded kidney stones had reappeared after an absence of some 16 years.
I called 999 after being violently sick and becoming feverish almost immediately. Yes, we'll call you back. They did. Yes, it sounds like you need to be hospitalised. Sadly we have no ambulances available.
Queue a frantic call to my folks who live an hour away. They downed tools and rushed over to find me still on the floor. 40 minutes in the car later i was in the A&E queue in Bath. After about 30 minutes I was triaged. By this time the paid had dropped to about a 7 and I could actually speak. Later that evening, dosed up on morphine, a volterol suppositary and a paracetamol drip I was put on the rotary ward for observation over night.
The next day a round of CT scans and x-ray confirmed a 0.5cm stone was trying to move through a 0.4cm Ureter pipe. They dosed me up and sent me home saying to come back if I had a recurrence.
2am Saturday morning - even worse 10.5/10 fever, sweats, vomiting, ambulance to A&E and two nights in where they discovered my kidney function was failing so they put me into emergency surgery to insert a 12" stent between the LH kidney and bladder.
A week later I was back having the stent and two stones removed and then they re-inserted another stent to allow the pipes to settle down and repair from all the tooings and froings by the cytoscope and stone grabber.
I'm back next week to have the stent removed a second time...this time by pulling on a cord that is currently hanging down out of the old fella. Apparently I have to breath in and out very hard as they 'pull'. You can't imagine how much the thought of that turns my stomach. If you hear a scream at 10am on the 5th. It's me.
The upshot of all this is most likely dehydration. I know I often overheat when opening hives. We've all done it on hot days. But this also allows those who are susceptible to stones to accumulate calcium in the kidney over time.
I'm now downing biblical volumes of water through the day to keep flushing the system. Tea is fine, not so much coffee or beer. In fact with the main killers I've been on beer or any alcohol isn't really on the cards and I haven't wanted a drink.
So the past two weeks has been spent largely horizontal or gingerly walking around. The stent rubs and I've managed about a day a week beekeeping, before the pain kicks in and I simply have to give up exhausted.
Last weekend over 120 supers were hastily put onto hives, just in case, but the weather this week hasn't been that good. Hopefully the rain will keep the clover and bramble yielding next when it warms up towards the 10th July.
It shows how much one gets waylaid by injury and illnesses. And how one is quite helpless to do much while the body recovers.
Hey ho. I hope by Wednesday all this is behind me !
KR
Somerford
